This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

I voted for Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne on Election Day, privately assuming she’d get a majority and then being astounded to have been proved right.

I usually vote NDP. I stopped voting for them federally in 2010 when they allowed a free vote among their members on maintaining the national long gun registry. I stopped voting NDP provincially this time when NDP Leader Andrea Horwath refused to back a Liberal budget that, among other things, would have created a pension plan that will rescue young people 40 years from now.

The lesson is that political cynicism does not pay.

We are warned that voters can be counted on for self-interested brutality, especially in economic hard times, which is why the most embittered and insecure people vote and why got elected. It’s not that media teach us this — we don’t have anything resembling that level of power — it’s more like something was slipped into our drinking water, or a poisonous gas drifted north from the Tea Party-ridden United States where hatred and stupidity rule.

Canada isn’t like the U.S. Ontario isn’t Idaho. We are good and smart, unusually so in an increasingly vicious political landscape.

Article Continued Below

We elected a woman premier, imagine that. I spent years worrying that the advance of gay rights had seemed to sidestep women, with lesbians as hidden in the shadows as ever. Their labelling wasn’t great, I thought. Maybe they should change it to “gamine” or something more fabulous. Yes, these were the idle dreams of an ardent egalitarian type.

There was a time when a divorced woman who had fallen in love with another woman would have been shut out of public life. Welcome, Premier Wynne.

Candidates with Chinese surnames won big, people with South Asian surnames, with South Asian-Chinese surnames, people with dark skin, young and old, all kinds of people. Ontario is a good place for ambitious people from a wider world.

Wynne’s budget was left-wing in that it had goals that can only be accomplished by government. The job of government is to be visionary, to plan for the future. The private sector can’t do that because it isn’t built into their structure.

Take Amazon, a magnificently organized and terrible corporation that plans ahead. It thinks less about its stock price than its glorious world-dominating future. But you wouldn’t book Amazon for deliveries in 2030. I barely trust them with Amazon Prime.

Tim Hudak, the son of two teachers, had no long-term plan beyond laying off teachers. He despised the “elite” — a code word that’s used like an electric dog collar — by which he meant urbanites all snobby about being able to add.

Even the sound of losing 100,000 public sector jobs appalled me. What must it be like to come up with a nice round figure like that, with no allowances for human suffering or indeed 100,000 people and their dependants who can no longer buy things from Ontario companies?

What a toxic era this is. Speaking of Tim Hudak, the ex-Conservative leader was a man who had never held a job outside politics beyond a brief interlude in his 20s at Walmart, who had never had to compose a job application letter, who couldn’t imagine what an ordeal that would be with a mortgage payment looming like an incipient bruise. That pasted-on smile, that gleam of vengeance. Voters could sense that. Stephen Harper, you’re up next.

Hudak’s backers were so angry. On Twitter, do not dare to chat with a right-wing friend or to cheerfully agree on a political issue like prostitution law with someone from Alberta who isn’t in your political pack. You’ll get followed by enraged men posing with rifles and you quietly back out of the Twitter room lest your friend get shot for his kind words.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com